Disentangling Flynn
by Grav
Summary: It takes two to tangle.  Post movie


**AN**: I'm still not sure how this happened, let alone how it became all about FLYNN. But here we are. You all know who is to blame!

**Spoilers**: For the movie, I guess. And possibly The Little Mermaid?

**Disclaimer**: Not mine, no profit, etc.

**Rating**: Kid Friendly

**Summary**: It takes two to tangle.

* * *

**Disentangling Flynn**

The first time he just asks her. He figures they've been through enough, and he's seen how everyone looks at them. _Destiny_, the market place whispers, and the ships in the port sigh back _True Love_.

He finds it a bit unsettling that she says no without even _thinking_ about it.

* * *

Flynn Rider was hardly the type to settle down. Eugene on the other hand? Born to stay in one place. This was made all too apparent when Eugene was a boy, and prospective mother after prospective father left the orphanage without him. They all seemed to prefer fair-haired girls and wide-eyed boys, their gazes sliding past him like a river over rocks. As Eugene got older, his face settling into its grown-up countenance and his shoulders bearing more and more of the weight of the world, the potential parents stopped looking at him altogether.

He was not without his use at the orphanage, even as his fateful eighteenth birthday approached. There was water to bring in from the well, after all, and on the rare occasion that there was a horse in the stable, it was Eugene's job to take care of it. He was spared the milking of the cow and the goat by the girls, who were under the impression that the work would keep their hands soft, but the matron saw to it that he didn't have many spare moments during the day.

What little free time he had, Eugene spent immersed in the world of his stories and the man he wanted to be when he grew up. The kind of man who had adventures to match his bravery, friends to match his heart, and a house to match his money. Lots and lots of money. Even before he left the orphanage, Eugene knew there was no going back.

* * *

"Did you know that other people charted the stars too?" she asks him one night at dinner. He'd been planning to propose again, but there's a visiting troupe of astronomers, and he can't get her attention for long enough to put his plan into action.

"I hadn't really thought about it," he admits. Telling her the truth is far, far too easy.

"It makes sense," she goes on, twisting her fork on her plate even though her dessert is long since eaten. "I didn't really think I was the only person to have ever looked up at the sky and then charted it. But it's nice to know I was right."

Seriously, how are you supposed to court a girl like that?

* * *

The world, Eugene discovered, was a terrifying place. For starters, he was a lot prettier than most ruffians, which meant the guards remembered him clearly (except for his nose), and the ruffians don't take him seriously. Fortunately, Eugene was also a lot smarter than the other ruffians, not to mention the guards, and it was on his cleverness and daring he built his reputation. And the name, of course. That wonderful, adventurous name.

Flynn Rider was many things that Eugene was not. Well fed, notable, homeless, vagrant, and so on into the darker side of his vocabulary. Flynn was also well on his way to becoming rich, which was a nice side benefit.

The downside was that the money didn't do him much in the way of good. Now that he was wanted across three kingdoms, he couldn't exactly buy real estate. And no matter what Flynn did, Eugene was always haunting the edges of his awareness, threatening to stay in one place and haul water from the well and be generally depressing until he died. So Flynn did his best to become a man that didn't exist.

* * *

This proposal, he's sure, is fool proof. He's been practicing with Maximus all week and, once convinced to take him seriously, the horse actually offers some fairly good notes. Or at least that what Eugene is going to pretend he believes.

Rapunzel says no again, though, despite his best efforts. He's beginning to have doubts about the whole thing, but there's something about the way Pascal looks at him, like he'd say something if Eugene was capable of understanding anything more than a tongue in the ear, that makes him decide to come up with another plan.

* * *

He let the Stabbington brothers talk him into stealing the tiara because no one had ever done it successfully before. It was the King and Queen's most prized possession after all, their only real reminder of what they lost all those years ago, the only connection to their daughter they have left, aside from the multitude of lights they sent up into the sky on her behalf every year.

There had been attempts, of course, heists whispered about in extra quiet voices in the cacophony of the Snuggly Duckling. Men havd dressed up as guardsmen, disguised themselves as furniture. And there was some other rumour Flynn had never been able to understand about a horse. But none of it ever worked, and the castle dungeons don't hold those who tried to steal the tiara for long before they were sent to the noose.

It took about eight words for the Stabbingtons to get him to do it. Flynn liked a challenge, and they had been hard to come by of late. So he plotted and planned, and comes up with something that might actually work. The key, of course, was to keep the tiara on him at all times, because otherwise it's two against one and those are not odds a thief should play by. He got half-way up the Tower before he started to wonder if it hadn't all been too easy after all.

* * *

"Have you ever thought that _she_ is trying to prove something to _you_?" The King finds him on the balcony because while Eugene can handle random dance sequences in a market or wayside tavern, the idea of dancing at a formal ball gives him cold feet.

"No," he replies, wondering when the truth became a reflex. He's had Flynn in his shadow so long that he never considered what tangle might be lingering in hers.

"It takes two to tangle," the King says knowingly. Because that's the kind of place Eugene lives in now, and he's starting to realize that for the first time in a while, he's living alone.

* * *

Flynn knew he wiould never fry an egg, look at the stars, catch a frog or look out a window without thinking about her ever again for the rest of his life. He might not even be able to brush his own hair anymore. She was uniquely infuriating and endearing, ridiculous and practical, brave and timid, independent and codependent, and he had no idea what to do with her from one moment to the next.

Her hair was magic and she took to calling him Eugene with frightening sincerity. She made the horse stop trying to kill him and he swore that if he squinted just right at the frog, he could nearly understand what it was trying to say. He had seen those lights fly upwards every year, but he had never really looked at them. When he pulled the flowers from the back of her hair so that she could lay them in the water behind the boat, he realized that he had forgotten all about the tiara.

Yeah, he was a goner.

* * *

Maximus rolls his eyes, but leads the wedding salute with a whinny anyway. Later, Eugene will buy him a dozen apples and steal one of them. Just to keep in practice.

"I suppose this means we get to live happily ever after now," Rapunzel says, because she's read enough fiction now to know how these things go. "With whatever nose and hair we like."

That seems workable to both of them.

* * *

They never got Flynn's nose right in the wanted posters. Flynn's nose was broken in a tavern brawl he hadn't been quite quick enough to avoid, and he had pretended that it never happened ever since. Eugene knew better now, knew what it meant to have your single defining feature taken away from you, because he took it from someone else.

For a while, he was convinced she was going to hate him, but she didn't. She approached life with shorter hair and that same undiminished spirit that sometimes made his teeth ache but left him wanting more at the same time. If she showed him how to be Eugene, then he was at least as responsible for the un-Gotheled version of Rapunzel.

He hoped that the rest of the world would someday forgive him. She lost none of her intensity, and while he was not yet sure what he had lost, he knew that whatever it was was more than worth it. It was about that time when he started thinking seriously about marrying her.

* * *

She marries him in the summer, two years after they met. He's more or less stopped flinching every time her father walks into the room and she's stopped thinking that she has to learn everything in a room before she goes into the next one. He answers to Eugene without looking around for someone else and she stops running everything by Pascal before she takes action. They aren't finished yet, not by any stretch, but they're closer, ready even.

"Ready for what?" Eugene asks.

* * *

**fin**

Thanks to Cinco for the beta!

Gravity_Not_Included, January 4, 2011**  
**


End file.
